NYAB Event - Mike Cloud "Agreement and Subjectivity"

Mike Cloud "Agreement and Subjectivity"

Meulensteen

This event has ended.

Agreement and Subjectivity demonstrates Cloud’s continuing involvement with system painting, whose concerns have provided points of both intersection and counterpoint thus far in his career. A new body of work, Quilt paintings, will be on view in the exhibition. The Quilt paintings are in fact two kinds of paintings: stuffed quilts made from children’s clothes stitched together with canvas, which serve as supports for oil paint; and screens, stretched pieces of plastic on which Cloud has painted images that are then printed onto the stuffed quilts. Cloud describes their connection to system painting as follows:
"The thing that attracts me to systematic painting is the metaphor of agreement: we can disagree about the subject of ‘Guernica’ but not the subject of a subway map. This allows me to have an agreed upon understanding of my paintings with everyone else. I try to stay
on the right side of authorship by proposing subjects that are as close to form as possible. Sometimes I use the skin of the painting itself as subject. In The Quilt paintings I want to propose a kind of closeness between subject and image. I still try to maintain the
agreement, but this time the language is something like common sense, or familiarity. My construction of the object is, I think, more strictly conceptual than my selection, arrangement and treatment of images. The making of the canvases has a reversible logic; clothes are shaped a certain way, they are sewn together and create a given edge. I think of the images as having form as well; ‘Fairy’ is something inside the form of Tinker Bell, and Tinker Bell allows me to think about fairies without having to imagine them."

Media

• Painting
• Other

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